Arabic regex giving TypeError

Question

I have this simple regex:

    text = re.sub("[إأٱآا]", "ا", text)

However, I get this (Python 2.7) error:

TypeError: expected string or buffer

I'm a regex newbie, I imagine this is a simple thing to fix, but I'm not sure how? Thanks.

Answer 1

Define all your strings as unicode and don't forget to add the encoding line in the header of the file:

#coding: utf-8

import re

text = re.sub(u"[إأٱآا]", u"ا", u"الآلهة")

print text

To get:

الالهة